Housing White Paper

Mark Harper Excerpts

Tuesday 7th February 2017 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

The hon. Lady might be aware that some of the type of land she refers to will be public land—it might be owned by different Departments or even local government—and there is a lot in the White Paper on what is called the accelerated construction programme, whereby Government can work together with councils and the private sector to develop more quickly.

More generally, the hon. Lady talks about empty homes, but in fact the number of empty homes in England has fallen to its lowest level since records began—the figure is just over 200,000; there is still more to do—and that is partly because of some of the changes we made to the new homes bonus, which gives local councils incentives to bring those homes back into use.

[Mr Mark Harper (Forest of Dean) (Con)]

Conservative-run Forest of Dean District Council is working hard to get its local plan in place. It gives out planning permissions to get new homes put in place, but gets frustrated when developers do not build them, and then the same developers put in speculative applications and argue that there is no land supply, because they are not building their own houses. I welcome what is in the White Paper, but what more can my right hon. Friend do to make sure those developers build the houses? As the excellent Housing Minister has said, people cannot live in planning permissions, they need houses.

[Sajid Javid]

My right hon. Friend makes an important point. He is right that many local authorities rightly get frustrated when they take those difficult decisions and then do not see the houses being built. There is a lot in this White Paper to tackle that. I gave one example a moment ago in my speech about compulsory purchase in the most extreme cases, but councils will also have new tools. For example, they will be able to put a time limit in place when they give a planning permission, so that it will expire if the developer does not create the homes in time. Also, completion notices will become much easier to serve, which will allow a local authority, when a developer has stalled, to end the planning permission and try again with someone else.